Sunday, June 5, 2016

Works of Outsider Fiction By John Sullivan

John
Sullivan received the "Jack Kerouac Literary Prize,"
"Writers Voice: New Voices of the West" award, AZ Arts
fellowships, Artists Studio Center fellowship, WESTAF fellowship, was
a featured playwright at Denver's Summer Play (Changing Scene
Theatre), and an Eco-Arts Performance fellowship from EMOS /
University of Oregon. He was Artistic/Producing Director of Theater
Degree Zero (Tucson / Bisbee AZ), and directed with the Augusto Boal
/ Theatre of the Oppressed focused applied theatre wing at Seattle
Public Theater. For the past decade, he has used Theatre of the
Oppressed with communities to promote dialogue on cumulative risk /
environmental justice issues in collaboration with NIEHS
environmental health scientists.

Dragontooth Children Blues

“Are you radioactive, pal?

Pal, radioactive.”

John Berryman (51st Dreamsong)

Dragontooth Children

Cold sheet we all

Rub together

For the heat (not the ions)

no shoe, new shoe, empty (not bereft)

prowl the street mutter back

and growl, again, we do (not grudge, not taunt)

and we mutter

you do right, my man

you do right

don’t be bitter or you

hurt your own soul bad

don’t be bitter

for your own soul’s sake

just be bluesed (Good God, my boogie suit

“just busted into flame”)

and be bluesed (my shoes, the very same,

catch on fire, just go out

dancin’)

be thou bluesed like old

shoes scuffle up outside the perimeter

klic-klic echo pass you by this street

of unstrung soldiers leaking conjures

tired curses, questions always

more bloody questions

like why now why this low-down moon

rubs me so ugly

like why now why this wind, this hawk

thing calling: Mrs. Bones

cross my face

and twist like new snow

make a hiss like a stone up top

a sky down below

calling: Mrs. Bones

Mrs. Bones calling

off frozen prairie

and I shiver (like a reflex but far away from it)

and I listen (ear to earth down eons of isms)

and I shiver (as all flesh shall, in the end,

crawl down)

and I listen (for the arco on the downlow)

and I shiver, and …

there’s blood on the wheat chaff

hard moonlight leaves its own special scar

like “soul-flight to the gone sun”

there’s blood on the wheat chaff

black fallow loam don't look

don’t walk out there

til the moon’s gone down

But hey, grow my own mouth

wide open like a movie star

Dragontooth Children all hatch

when the weather goes bad

Dragontooth Children all hatch

and march together

all together tight (like Busby Berkeley,

not so much)

in a jagged circle tight (more and more like Leni

Riefenstahl’s deco-thug

chorea)

in a straight line locked, all together

tight all together:

we

can’t kick that rhythm

til sun don't hiss like snow no more

then goodbye, goodbye, Mrs. Bones,

goodbye

then goodbye rumor, too

taste it in the air

in the moonlight in the dust

I do

around my skin I draw

an Ellipse of Uncertainty

and squeeze some further ichor

pure blood at the vuln (or just a flood of profane

lightnin’, maybe)

from Soren’s retro “Either / Or” tattoo

staying on right here

I will, between steel

and its own shadow

some say: it’s a good place to visit,

but to hide? (or just fake it?)

I don’t know?

Dragontooth Children ain’t no lack

of Dragontooth Children

come a scuffle up we

search a sky for the good fight

and a glow

and we bring bad weather with us

and our mother is bad weather

and we sing loud to our mother

Edsels and Deloreans of the Gods

I slouch toward holy Youngstown flat out, shaking down my ’69 LeMans full of spit, sloppy rings and it’s own kind of lust. Pulling on my quart of SunLand Gin, shaking that way too, I tune my radio to this griot lady growling scratchy, spookhouse blues behind a harp and poke my tongue out the window just for remembrance – for that last taste of steam, particulate and acid in the used up, but still flammable, factory air. O Youngstown, I remember you, owned by Westinghouse, US Steel, in thrall to Sheet & Tube, your pale sun spinning, blind and hollow, in a brown sky like the palms of Pluto, yeah, like Egon Schiele out of Goya gassed up and gone on something skank and eternal.

Long time, long time Youngstown, you cut a swathe through my dreamtime, flapping your wings like a black shroud at a new Tong Funeral.

That’s how I remember, but too-bad-now because the Steel Goddess lost her shine, shut down, got stiff and creaky, and the air now tastes all government approved. No burnt shards of recap, no junkers of the fracked and dead spread out along the highway, just civic skin and soft light, all things pleasant, total too, and downtown near the formal zone of silence I meet this hologram of Allan Watts, shaking like an Ariel with no wings in the wind. Like me, so we shake it down together for a while and wait on slow bolts from Jesus, shaking, smiling, I say: Mr. Allan Watts, whatever incarnation are you working on today? And he beams back at me, his smile transects the dead orbits of industry and need spinning hollow over Youngstown like eldritch crows at work upon a dead knight’s corpse.

In ’68 I saw Allan on this PBS show and his head glowed through his tonsure like the bone beneath. Even then he beamed throughout the stratosphere and drew a tree of chakras on a screen behind my eyes, and his mouth moved as his hand moved, and he said while he drew: “Love is multipolar, a warm valence, a wave that washes over, and renews …” on and on, as sullen Youngstown sweated for the promise of an early absolution. I’d sleep then, nestled in my ignorance, and dream upon the shiny dome of Allan – like an ice moon, like the blank swollen eyeball of a punchy swollen monkey – until my own dream became the bone beneath his tonsure, became, itself, that shiny dome, became … became … until my eyes snapped open and my own mouth moved: but O the price, my own mouth sang that groove, the one price always got’s to rise, especially when you need the merchandise that bad …

… and now the polished air of Youngstown’s fallen deep into grace. Far from flare and smoky contrail, far from blaze and orange breath of the Bessemer ovens, the new sun over Youngstown floats, all domestic now, newly bald, why wouldn’t it be loverly, and this hologram of Allan Watts chants steady into my face: “ … the problem is embodied liberation, the problem is embodied liberation, the problem is …” like I’m steady nudging on his needle, or he’s got this glitch in his cante hondo circuits,

and wanders through the dead heart of Youngstown stuck in a recursion loop. It’s plain to me that now: the plain folks got some downtime during graveyard shift, and breathe good, too, like Kundalini zombies, but now, they also got no pockets, can’t dance, won't walk, don’t much sharpen their hobnails on the old familiar skullsongs. All the gears and jacks and levers of ancient Youngstown stalagmatize and rust, and this hologram of Allan Watts beams its futile dream, and chants into my face: “the problem is …”

… my gin’s all gone, and the bottle slurs its dry tongue of dust back me, jeering nya-nya-nya, etc. “Still got the try, old machine, or what?”